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Security researchers have identified malware that hijacks the resources of infected Macs to illegally mint the digital currency known as Bitcoin.

The DevilRobber.A trojan has been circulating on The Pirate Bay and other BitTorrent trackers, where it's bundled with the Mac OS X image-editing application Graphic Converter, researchers from Sophos blogged on Monday. Like previous malware attacking Windows PCs, it commandeers a Mac's graphics card and CPU to perform the mathematical calculations necessary to generate new digital currency, a process known as Bitcoin mining.

As researchers from rival antivirus provider Intego point out in their own blog post, Bitcoin mining is just one of the many activities performed by the recently discovered trojan.

“This malware is complex, and performs many operations,” they wrote. “It is a combination of several types of malware: it is a Trojan horse, since it is hidden inside other applications; it is a backdoor, as it opens ports and can accept commands from command and control servers; it is a stealer, as it steals data and Bitcoin virtual money; and it is a spyware, as it sends personal data to remote servers.”

In addition to hijacking a Mac's GPU and CPU for Bitcoin mining, DevilRobber.A also searches an infected machine for any Bitcoin wallets. If found, the malware will purloin the digital currency. It also steals passwords, browsing history from Safari browsers, and data from Vidalia, a Firefox plugin used to communicate over the TOR anonymity service.

So far, DevilRobber.A has been installed on only a small number of machines. But it's part of a growing wave of increasingly sophisticated malware targeting Mac users. Over the past month, at least two other OS X trojans have also been discovered, including Tsunami, which is derived from an earlier Linux-infecting backdoor called Kaiten, and Flashback, which was recently updated to make it harder for researchers to do reconnaissance on it. ®